$1,000,000,000,000? Keep the change.

For a guy who claims to understand economics and monetary theory, you're sure failing to grasp the most simple concepts here.

Yeah, it's that or you missed something. Either I, and everyone else who has commented on the legality of the coin approach misunderstood a simple fact that you inferred with no actual knowledge of the mechanics...or...you missed something.

I never said it wasn't legal. I said that it wouldn't accomplish what people think it would. In more or less the exact same way that someone can claim that "buying a red car will allow me to drive 200mph!", but no amount of pointing out how it's legal to buy a red car means that said red car will allow him to drive 200mph.

Uh huh... It's not about distraction at all though. Krugman said in his article(s) that you'd still end out having to raise the debt to actually use the coin Smash. But Krugman is well aware that downplaying that aspect of the issue and just going along with the whole "yeah. They could do that!" bit provides a helpful distraction. That guy hasn't been a serious economist in like 20 years. He's all about the politics of economic language, not the economics itself.

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We're either *all* incorrect....or you missed something.

Or I saw something you missed. And btw, "we" isn't correct. I'm reasonably certain all those experts you're talking about know exactly what I'm talking about. But they know that most people wont know that, so they just don't mention it. They didn't miss anything. I didn't miss anything. You may or may not have missed anything, depending on whether you honestly believe a coin could be used that way, or you're just playing to a crowd you know doesn't know one way or another. I'm still somewhat on the fence with that one.

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Occam s razor and all that, obviously we're all wrong. It's weird how you can pinpoint when you start to go to crazytown, and in some ways so disappointingly easy to manipulate.

Occam's razor tells us that we should look at what people actually say about the coin, not what other infer from it. There's no contradiction in reality. It's two different things.